LavenderWolf:El Dudereno: firemanbuck: shower_in_my_socks: Here's an atom bomb test as seen from Los Angeles some time in the 1950s:

[www.retronaut.com image 800x624]

It would be tragicomical to see Lil' Kim launch a nuclear missile and have it successfully cross the Pacific Ocean, only to land harmlessly in a desert wasteland far outside of Los Angeles.

/more photos of atom bomb tests seen from LA here

Imma call BS on those photos. No tests were ever done in the California Mojave desert...they were all done in Nevada or New Mexico. The blast cloud wouldn't appear that large from the LA basin for a detonation several hundred miles away.

It's probably Vegas.

I know for a fact that there's no way that's LA, anyways.

If you even could see a nuclear blast from LA, it would take up maybe one or two degrees of the horizon. No atomic blast has ever been so large that it would be seen from that far away and take up so much of the sky.

Addendum: If that *were* LA, and a bomb were detonated that close, the city would be a radioactive wasteland, and any outlying urban areas in the direction of the blast would probably suffer heavy blast damage.

The old rule is something like "If you hold out your thumb, and the fireball isn't covered, don't bother running because you're already dead."

shower_in_my_socks:Here's an atom bomb test as seen from Los Angeles some time in the 1950s:

[www.retronaut.com image 800x624]

It would be tragicomical to see Lil' Kim launch a nuclear missile and have it successfully cross the Pacific Ocean, only to land harmlessly in a desert wasteland far outside of Los Angeles.

/more photos of atom bomb tests seen from LA here

Imma call BS on those photos. No tests were ever done in the California Mojave desert...they were all done in Nevada or New Mexico. The blast cloud wouldn't appear that large from the LA basin for a detonation several hundred miles away.

Cymbal:b2theory: Cymbal: Got to justify that exorbitant military budget somehow.

Look at the total casualty count from WW2. If we assume that total US military hedgomony makes it impossible for a country to use its military for any gain, you could say its worth every cent.

Even if that were true, which I very seriously doubt, you can't tell me the US needs to spend as much as the next ten largest nations combined? That's just absurd.

Not going to go full derp on this point, because I agree we could take a sizable chunk out of our defense budget and still be viable.

There's a good number of things that count as part of the 'defense' budget, because it's a pretty broad term. When when aren't playing world police, we're also playing world rescue. The Haiti Earthquake, or Fukushima. Every time there's a natural disaster of signifigant proportion, the U.S. sends supplies and personnel on really expensive ships, cargo planes, and helicopters to deliver aid.

That's money we usually don't end up getting back, that we don't want back. We have rescues at sea, we have 2 hospital ships who are obligated to render service to anyone (whether they're an enemy combatant or not), and we have portions of the defense budget that are tied to other portions of the defense budget (like NASA, Veterans Hospitals which are also obligated to render service to anyone in distress, etc.), and what have you.

We also donate a lot of time and money running training exercises with other countries who do not have a military force comparable to our own. For instance when our carrier fleets go around the Straits of Magellan, we make stops near Brazil and some of our other friends in South America to run drills and let them launch and land their own warplanes off our carrier decks. Not to mention sending advisors and analysts to countries we are not 'officially' involved with in a combat capacity.

Again, we can still carve out a nice chunk of the Defense budget because there is plenty of waste there. But our military does a lot of good for the world in addition to getting involved with unnecessary wars, so there is at some justification for having a signifigantly large military budget.